KEEP YOUR COMPASSION, GIVE ME YOUR MADNESS

By ANATOLE BROYARD; Anatole Broyard is an editor of The Book Review.

Published: June 21, 1987

I'M always puzzled when I see an advertisement for a novel in which a reviewer, or several reviewers, are quoted as praising the novel's ''compassion'' and its ''integrity.'' What compassion? is my first reaction. Never in the history of the novel have authors given their characters such a hard time. Why, novelists seem positively gleeful in exposing their people's pettiness, their dishonesties, secret humiliations and ugly yearnings. And more often than not, at the end of the book the author just leaves his subjects mired in their imperfections, like somebody buried in sand.

Anyway, who wants to read a compassionate book? Is the Bible compassionate? Is Shakespeare? There's something sticky, pious or namby-pamby about the word. A good character doesn't need all that compassion - he can stand on his own. Compassion reminds me of a moral handout, a form of literary welfare. It is too simple, not in the right key, for novels whose characters tend to survive on the strength of their deviousness and stubborn wrongheadedness.

I would expect a serious novelist to be passionate or dispassionate rather than compassionate, closer to fire and brimstone, or hell and damnation, than to homiletics or ''good works.'' What's more, I wonder whether it isn't almost oxymoronic for a novel to be brilliant and compassionate at the same time. The more I think of it, the more it seems that the writing of novels is a form of sadomasochism, and that the better the novelist, the more unforgiving he is. In my darker moments, I wonder whether compassion isn't just another form of writer's block. My favorite image of the novelist comes from a comic strip about a couple named Dagwood and Blondie. Getting ready to brush his teeth one night, Dagwood finds that they are out of toothpaste, the tube is absolutely flat. In a rage, he takes an enormous pair of pliers and, with a demonic smile on his face, squeezes the tube until the last dollop of toothpaste comes out. I see this as the creative impulse to go to extremes, not to give in to circumstance, to press for the last gasp.

Integrity is a quality I want in my plumber or in the mechanic who fixes my car, not in a novelist. In fact, I think of a novel as a stratagem for coping with the disappearance of integrity. You build churches, not novels, on integrity. You can't even build a successful government on it. Novelists noted for their integrity remind me of the kneeling, praying figures of the donor or patron that are included by contract in Renaissance paintings of the Crucifixion.

Honesty, probity, uprightness, virtue, purity, rectitude - these are the synonyms for integrity in the Random House Thesaurus. Do they bring to mind any modern novelist you know? If you said to Norman Mailer, ''What I like best about your novels is their compassion and integrity,'' he might punch you in the mouth.

What I'd love to see is a review in which the critic says something like this: ''Here's a novel that has nothing to offer but compassion and integrity - no whimsy, daring, excess, irony or recklessness. Skip it.''

What an appealing thing neurosis can be when it's combined with greatness, as in the case of, say, a Nietzsche, a Kierkegaard or a Rousseau. Introducing an all-too-human note, neurosis gives greatness a lyrical quality, makes it warm, intimate, intense - sometimes even comical. Greatness needs to be saved from impersonality, for it's the impersonality, the incomparability, that makes greatness cold and aloof. I'm led to these reflections by Jonathan Beecher's splendid new book, ''Charles Fourier: A Visionary and His World'' (University of California) - for as Mr. Beecher says, Fourier was a ''great neurotic.'' How can you help loving a man who wants to rescue the world from ''the bondage of incoherence,'' who promises to ''punish his century''?

Born in France in 1772, Fourier was one of the grand - perhaps the grandest - of the utopians. While most utopians have a hint of madness about them, Fourier utilized his madness instead of repressing it, and pushed it to the sublime. In his ideal world, which he calls Harmony, the planets copulate, the sea turns to lemonade, amorous and ''gastrosophic'' wars drain off all aggression and competitiveness.

Fourier was the first utopian to suggest pleasure as the driving force of an ideal society. Borrowing Newton's idea of gravitational attraction, he applied it to society in the form of ''passionate attraction,'' thus becoming the only reformer in history to take human nature as he found it, the only one to shape his utopia to humanity's needs rather than the other way around.

He was also the only utopian whose plan reflected the almost inconceivable diversity of human nature. Most utopias are like banked fires; they try to calm down their citizens with meditative or pastoral pleasures. But Fourier based his Harmony on a guaranteed sexual minimum; he even planned to have ''fakirs'' and ''fairies'' to accommodate people with manias, which he called ''diminutive passions.'' Listing 810 basic psychological types, he worked out an algebra of attraction for them. He also identified three dominant categories: the arrangers, the intriguers and the butterflies.

Fourier had the kind of obsessive thoroughness we associate with novelists like James Joyce and Henry James. Preparing himself for his first communion when he was seven years old, he composed a list of the sins he couldn't understand and confessed to them all, including fornication and simony.

How did Fourier come to know so much about human nature and society? One supposes he must have been a great scholar, a haunter of libraries. But, as Mr. Beecher points out, he had only an ordinary education. It was during his years as a traveling salesman, in coaches and rude inns, that he instructed himself by looking and listening. As a clerk in a countinghouse, he learned to calculate human profit and loss.

And then he was a great quarreler. To be a great revolutionary - or a great novelist - you have to love quarreling. Fourier always hoped for a rich benefactor to take his part in his quarrel with the world by financing his utopia. He compiled a list of 4,000 possible benefactors and wrote to them in turn. Every day, precisely at noon, he went home to await their coming.

Fourier wrote several books, but like other grand originals, he received little serious attention during his life. His last 15 years he lived alone in Paris. The author of ''The Amorous World'' had no recorded amorous connections. At the age of 35, he realized that he liked the company of lesbians. He also liked cats, wine and marching bands. One of his disciples observed that he was immune to climate or temperature.

While some scholars question Fourier's sanity, Mr. Beecher raises a better question: was it possible that Fourier offered his work partly in a spirit of parody? Can a great writer ever wholly eliminate the spirit of parody? In Fourier's case, we know that in one of his books he used dozens of different typefaces, and another begins on page 409, as if to suggest a suppressed antecedent, like a soundless laugh.

When Fourier was a boy, he loved to have flowers in his room. Eventually, however, there were so many pots that he decided to get rid of them, and he covered the floor instead with several inches of soil. His mind was like his room: fecund, overflowing, earthy.